A new Apollo

Apollo, May, 2004 by Michael Hall

ALTHOUGH editors like to think that everybody turns immediately to the leader, readers usually prefer to have a good browse through a magazine first and so by now you probably already realise that this month APOLLO has undergone many changes. It is for the first time all in colour, and has been redesigned. There is a richer editorial mix: the reviews section has been greatly expanded, Susan Moore has joined the magazine to write about the art market, Louise Nicholson will be reporting from New York every month, and Gavin Stamp has started what promises to be a provocative monthly column on architecture. We will carry news and previews of major events in the international art world, and articles on topical events and controversies--this month, for example, Martin Bailey reports on the efforts to restore the National Museum in Baghdad after the damage inflicted in the aftermath of the war.

Readers with long memories may have a sense that APOLLO is returning to its roots. For twenty five years, from 1962 until 1987, under the inspirational editorship of Denys Sutton, it was the world's liveliest magazine on the visual arts. The new APOLLO is setting out to recapture the zest of the old--a zest for exploring not only painting and sculpture but also the decorative arts of all sorts and the discoveries made in the salerooms and by dealers as well as by professional scholars. We will be expanding the magazine's horizons to subjects only intermittently covered before, including photography and, in due course, archaeology. Most significantly of all, perhaps, the magazine is gently introducing contemporary art to its pages, having abolished its long-standing rule not to discuss art made after 1945.

Such changes are prompted in part by the way the audience for art has evolved since Sutton retired. His APOLLO addressed not only the academic art historian or museum professional, who has always been an important part of the readership, but also the amateur enthusiast, who went to exhibitions, bought art books, and had a serious but not expensive collection of, for example, Battersea enamels or Colonial period furniture, and wanted authoritative information on these and allied subjects. Does such an audience exist today?

I think it does, but it has changed out of recognition: it is bigger, and more diverse. It is often claimed that there are no real collectors today, except at the very top of the market. Yet, to take England as an example, a recent poll commissioned by the sponsors of a prize for contemporary drawing, PizzaExpress Prospects 2004, found that Londoners alone had in 2003 spent 523 million [pounds sterling] on works of art. Some of that sum can be accounted for by a desire to buy as an investment, but it is much more likely that it reflects a simple pleasure in owning art, encouraged by the experience of visiting museums, art galleries and exhibitions.

Today's attendance figures at those galleries and exhibitions would have astonished and thrilled curators in the 1960s. This popular enthusiasm is especially inspiring given that there are so many more sources of visual stimulation than there were when Sutton was editor. Indeed, the problem that most galleries face today is not lack of public interest, but the pressure on their core values caused by the commercial imperative to provide attractions for mass-market visitors, from blockbuster exhibitions to shops and restaurants.

One other transformation since the 1960s is the way that contemporary art and architecture have become subjects of wide popular interest in a way that serious modern music, for example, has not. For evidence, look only at the triumph of Tate Modern. The success of that great gallery suggests, however, another change since Sutton's time. 'Taste' and 'the educated public' were then coherent concepts, in a way that they are not now. For many people, for example, an interest in contemporary art has become a lifestyle statement that goes with an enthusiasm for urban living and modern design, and seems remote from many traditional values.

'Taste' has been democratised, and is now as a result far more heterogeneous. Yet it seems likely that the crowds who are attracted to shows at Tate Modern or MOMA, collect contemporary art or buy books on Frank Gehry overlap more than is often realised with those who go to the Grosvenor House or Armory art and antiques fairs, or visit Lille for the current Rubens exhibition. As it approaches its 80th anniversary next year, the new APOLLO will endeavour to bring these diverse audiences for art together by doing what is has always done, publishing articles based on the traditional values of scholarship and original research, but now balanced with a new appetite for topicality and news. It is a challenge to relish, and we hope you will join us.